Seeing Things | Turning the Tables

Scott Mayoral/Courtesy Ball-Nogues StudioBall-Nogues Studio’s “Table Cloth” installation will be on view at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall throughout the summer.

If you happen to visit U.C.L.A.’s campus this summer, take a detour through the courtyard of Schoenberg Hall, which is home to the university’s Herb Alpert School of Music. There, Ball-Nogues Studio, an enterprising young Los Angeles architecture practice, has created “Table Cloth,” a site-specific installation that is on view through the summer. In a play on its name, “Table Cloth” doesn’t cover a table, but rather is a cover that is made of tables. Hundreds of them.

Paco Rabanne’s iconic 1966 ‘disc’ dress.

For this installation, which is a collaboration with U.C.L.A.’s departments of architecture, music and design and media arts, Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues designed a kind of curtain that drapes over the east side of Schoenberg Hall’s courtyard, unrolling where it meets the ground to become an intimate “in the round” performance space. Seen from the front, “Table Cloth” recalls a larger-than-life swath of Paco Rabanne’s iconic 1966 dress of metallic discs. Closer observation reveals that the “fabric” is actually made of more than 200 wooden tables and stools. The installation is a backdrop for performances that will take place throughout the summer, as well as for the everyday social interaction of a college campus.

Scott Mayoral/Courtesy Ball-Nogues Studio“Table Cloth,” an installation by Ball-Nogues Studio, is made of hundreds of individual tables and stools.

Ball-Nogues Studio used an approach they call “cross manufacturing” to design, manufacture and repurpose the project’s elements. They worked with U.C.L.A. students to fabricate and install the coffee tables and stools — each of which is a unique shape — that make up “Table Cloth.” When the installation is dismantled, the furniture will be given to members of the university community. Rabanne, who, coincidentally, was trained as an architect, famously declared that the only new frontier left in fashion was the finding of new materials. The fashion designer was also something of a populist. Thirty years after creating his iconic dress, Rabanne issued a D.I.Y. kit, complete with pliers, so that consumers could make dresses of their own at a fraction of the price. Like Rabanne, Ball and Nogues have also created a shimmering fabric of hard, industrially produced materials that, in keeping with their desire for sustainability, will have a life of their own long after “Table Cloth” is gone.